Afterdamp
by Ninjagrrl
Summary: Afterdamp is the toxic mixture of gases left in a mine following an explosion. Post 362 AU, Deidara and Itachi centric.


Afterdamp

Author's Notes- I don't know. This is one of those fics where I came up with the title before the plot. And.. uhh, arguably there isn't a plot. It's an excuse to write post-362 notdead!Deidara, because I think he'd be really fucked off about surviving, plus some interactions with Sasori and Itachi. Probably gen all round.

Also, I write Deidara as being a bit of a narcissistic personality, in the clinical sense. People with this sort of personality have overblown, but fragile egos that mean they can't handle threats to their self-esteem like someone with a truly healthy, positive self-image can. So they may _think_ that they think they're the greatest thing ever, but if anything causes them to doubt themselves, they can't just shrug it off because ultimately they can't back it up. It also fits Deidara's need for acknowledgement from Sasori and Sasuke, and his lack of empathy as far as his bombing goes (at least, I always got the impression that he wasn't 'sadistic', he just genuinely didn't care who got caught in them)

Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended.

_Afterdamp is the toxic mixture of gases left in a mine following an explosion (source: Wikipedia_)

- - -

In his dreams, Deidara is about to go supernova.

They start in that one very still moment before it all happens, all the bitter poison slowly draining away as he meets the Uchiha's unmoved gaze, and nothing matters any more. It would not matter any more if the Sharingan burned in them, because there is nothing a trick of light and shadows can do against the slow, inevitable breakdown inside his own cells. It would not matter if he saw contempt in those cool and smooth onyx eyes. It doesn't even matter that Deidara _doesn't_ see contempt, or hatred, or fear. He sees nothing, and that's the worst of them all, but it does not matter any more.

He plucks the stitches out one by one, his movements gone slow and dreamy as he feels the latent power that thrums inside every handful of dust and blood and bone, and knows there is enough trapped energy inside him to crack the earth to its core.

And then the air tastes like charged storm winds, all ozone and lightning and the crackling white fire that courses through him, blood steaming away beneath it as it surges out through every capillary and spreads itself in bleach-white sheets below his skin. And every cell is a tiny powerhouse waiting to self-destruct, and the entity known as Deidara is no more. He is transcending and breaking through, reducing to a handful of elements, the light and plasma that came from the heart of a star.

And the light swells around him, and before it vapourises the world, lightning judders through him in a throaty static cough. And everything is always shrinking and cooling in seconds, back down to a scattering of distant pinpricks in the night sky, empty light thrown out by stars that died years ago.

* * *

And then Deidara woke up on his side somewhere else altogether, face pressed into ground-glass heat. He opened his eyes, and saw the milder fire of a sun too far away to really feel, scorching only his skin. He breathed dry desert air, filled with the smell of heated rocks and face powder. A small, black scorpion ran across his outstretched hand, and he watched it without interest.

These were Sasori's homelands, and he had kept Deidara alive more than once when they had been passing through. Sasori knew when sandstorms were coming, and which way to turn across all that blank nothingness to reach water before Deidara's supplies ran out. Right now, Deidara recalled it was a very bad idea to lie out underneath the sun like this. He turned his hand over, and watched the scorpion scuttle with the movement, and then it was a clay centipede twining through his fingers, silky-smooth against his skin. He let it go, and watched it burrow into the ground like a living thing.

Deidara rolled over and stared into a blazing sky so blue it hurt to look at it. All the colours out here were hot and primal and fierce, the pastels burned away long ago. The sand was the white colour of ground bone, broken only by red rocks breaking through like new teeth. The sky was the colour of a gas jet turned up high. The sun was white too, and he stared into it without blinking, wondering if fire and light so far away would blind him.

A shadow fell over him, a slice of catacomb air that smelled dry and dead like chilled wood and clean corpse husks.

"Sasori-danna."

Sasori's calm glass gaze rolled over Deidara with little interest. "You'll die out here."

"It was going to be a masterpiece," Deidara said distantly, the chill from Sasori's shadow sinking through him and the pale heat the desert sun had left behind. He would have flayed the skies that day, an explosion that would have blasted Sasori's fragile exoskeleton to blonde splinters.

Beneath him, Deidara could hear the tiny sounds of the centipede burrowing, working through the blasted sand with insect patience. He spread his arms lazily, and let himself fall as it began to sink below him, and went back into the cool darkness below the sands.

Sometimes the darkness wasn't cool at all, and he began to feel distant, prickling pains creeping in like the burrowing scorpions below the desert, and then he tore himself free of the pain and the nagging feeling that something had gone very wrong, and instead he wandered through his homelands again, soaring with his face turned into the clean knife-edge of the wind, and always crashing and burning at the end.

* * *

Days passed like this.

Without Sasori, Deidara no longer seemed to be grounded. Before this, no matter how high he had soared, he had always felt the weight of the puppetmaster's presence tethering him to the ground, impossibly heavy as though Sasori had cast his soul in woods and metal and petrified bone. Now his thoughts began to scatter and smooth out like desert sand in the wind, and like the sand, shaped itself into meaningless drifts and patterns. He turned them over, did not like what he saw there, and kicked them back to white sand spray again.

Deidara could not wake fully. Sometimes he was near enough consciousness to realise this was all dreams and delusions, and he raged dully against it until sleep broke over him in thick and syrupy waves and his consciousness skittered apart like a thousand beads of mercury. He would patiently gather himself over and over again. And Sasori watched with little interest, as Deidara struggled through soft waves of sand, trying to break through.

"You're _dead," _he raged in his dreams sometimes, lips skinned back in a smile that was more snarl at the memory. Sasori had died as much as he could ever die, with swords in his back and all his puppets gone to splinters.

Sasori did not seem to care. Dying would have been almost painless, for a puppet. His central nervous system had long since been stripped down, left disconnected and dead. He had felt nothing and regretted nothing. He had lived, like a ghost, in a machine that he could haunt and never touch. He had walked through fire, and it had not burned. He only knew injuries by the dull patches gouged into his glossy shell.

And Deidara clung to the pain that came prickling through the sedation, and welcomed it, because it meant he was still alive and not like Sasori, tethered by blade and splinters to a dead heart in a cask that did not bleed and did not beat, and had felt no pain as the twin swords had split open its parched ventricles and let his thin ghost out.

Sasori was skinning his hand now, beneath the desert sun. It wasn't right. Deidara had not been born when this had happened, and it would not have been out here, full of sand that would fill the joints with glittering grit crystals. But he carried on anyway, peeling back skin like wafers of paper, exposing fine bird-bones packed in flesh as bright and pulpy as blood oranges. This wasn't the Sasori that Deidara had known, after he had flayed away as much of his humanity as scalpels could ever reach.

"It would have been perfect," he repeated, less certainly. And Sasori laughed, a stony gurgle, as though his throat was full of formaldehyde and gravel.

Sand biting under Deidara's heel, he turned away from Sasori and walked out under the pale and distant sun that had left him behind.

* * *

Deidara surfaced three times, like a drowning man dies, before he broke through fully.

The first time, he only knew pain, a deep splintery ache as though every bone had been ground up and stuffed back in place any way it would go. A mild sting in his arm, and he raged once more as the sand came back and swept him underneath.

The second time, he skimmed just below the surface as he had once sliced over open waters on carved clay wings, listening to the dim and oceanic sounds that drifted just beyond him. And the third time, he fell untidily back into himself, only he had gone as dull and heavy as uncharged clay, his nervous system all burned-out wires in his hands. And he had panicked for a moment, before he had remembered-

No, Sasori was dead. He was not a puppet.

The fourth time, Deidara's eyes racketed open like nailed-shut windows forced up. His desert sky was gone, and the ceiling was the smooth colour of damp and uncharged clay. His left wrist jerked spasmodically once, twice, down by his side, and then he moved it, skimming over sheets until he gripped the edge of the bed. A calm and measured beep came periodically from his side.

Deidara lifted his head, and felt his spine crack and pop all along its length in protest. There was a tight spot between his collar bones, a perfect circle of scar tissue like a burn. He raised himself up on one elbow, and winced as the grafted and fractured bones squealed together, and then fell back onto his pillow through wasted muscle or memories-

_Tobi, he doesn't know what he's done-_

When the nurses came, they told him it was a hospital. If so, it was a very small one. Deidara suspected it was something Pein had arranged for an occasion like this. There were very few sounds, and no doctors ever came to see him. The nurses themselves were attentive, but not friendly. There was something strange and blank about them, as lifeless as Sasori's puppets. They did not chatter to him or among themselves. Threats rolled off like drops of oil. He caught one around the throat once, threatened to break her neck if they didn't tell him where he was, and the pulse below his wrist ran smooth and unhurried.

Deidara let go when he realised he didn't care about getting any answers.

It had all become irrelevant. He had crashed back into a place in the back of his mind where he had only been sent once before, and the memory of those eyes still smouldered dully, the colour of settled coals.

When he was awake, Deidara lay trapped in heavy and solid flesh that had cooled around him, like the dull glazed rocks that once were the earth's bright arterial blood. When the nurses came with their medication, he turned into the sand that broke over him and let it bury him in dreams that had gone the wet, black colour of burned-out fireworks. Sometimes there he replayed the moments in the forest and the quicksilver reaction that had spilled through him, and there was always jagged white fire juddering through him, bringing the breakdown shuddering to a halt. And where he could once make wet and white clay airborne, he could not sift and salvage anything from the cooling ashes he had become.

* * *

A week of meaningless time slipped by without measurement, before he heard the calm voices of the nurses talking among themselves, and he realised Itachi was somewhere in the building.

The nurses sedated him soon afterwards. When the sand crashed over him, he came up fighting, but it was rock now, jagged slabs of it crashing down a wounded cliff face of a country he had not seen in a long time. Crushed beneath them, he wasn't surprised to see the broken corpse that shared his grave.

It was strange, that Deidara had killed so many people so carelessly, but only that one had ever been personal. And the only crime had been to be good, and perhaps even better than himself. His lungs full of stone dust, Deidara scraped his hands raw trying to get out, and it wasn't fear or guilt or shame that drove him. It was because Deidara was impulsive and Deidara could blind himself to almost anything, but Deidara was not stupid, and in the back of his mind he dimly knew that his world was always a fragile one, and it took very little to bring it crashing down into ruins. And back there was a place and time before he had been the genius from the Stone, something he had carefully buried long ago in praise and encouragement and fragile lies papered over a very long fall.

He didn't remember the face. He didn't even remember the name. He only remembered the savage sort of joy that came afterwards, as close to calm as he ever would be, knowing that to soar higher he would have to first tear everyone else out of his way.

He had risen again the first time he had fallen, later that first day when the dull shock wore off. Hiruko's tail had unfolded with a lazy snap, caught him across the chest and broke three ribs as he was thrown back to the ground. Deidara skidded in dust and gravel, raised himself up on his elbows and stopped dead as the tip swung before his eyes, carved wood coated with a dull cracked glaze of poison.

"You are not indispensable," Sasori growled, his voice strained through Hiruko and scraping over him like the blade of a dulled and rusted knife. "You will do as I say, or you may leave Akatsuki as a corpse. Choose whichever you wish."

Deidara was not like Sasori who could patiently hold onto his grudges for decades, spinning his plans and waiting at the centre like a spider in a web, for the right time to pull all those wires tight. But time had let the fresh wound scab and scar, and the trapped memory seethed below the surface, running hot with poison.

* * *

His brittle life beginning to crumble like the burned-up carbon skeletons left behind after a forest fire, something stirred in Deidara. Thin, but hot, a colourless trickle of lighter fuel that could ignite or could poison him from the inside out.

He had risen from ashes before, and that got him through the dull fog of medication and the broken-glass pain that came splintering up through it. A bright row of blood beads strung full and ripe like berries across the cool white floor as he pulled out the IV and let it spatter carelessly on the floor. It took three tries before he could stand. Deidara took the first slow step, and crashed heavily into the wall a second later. He dragged himself back up, almost sobbing with something closer to rage than sorrow.

There were only bruised greenish veins below his skin where channels of fire had once run. His hands shook like dried skeletal leaves. The mouths in his palms were thin and bloodless like old scars, one flash-fused shut with a white line of melted scar tissue.

_Months_. He had been here for months.

Deidara made his way out of the room painfully slow, holding onto the wall as all his deadweight dragged him back down like wet and formless clay, back into the earth and the slow and inevitable suck of gravity below that. A thousand minor pains spread with each slow and shuffling step, twinged and shivered out in slack and lifeless muscle. He passed by a plastic clashing of keyboards in one room, a steady electronic beep in the second. He carried on. He would _know._

The sand rose up, heavy and wet and gray sea-soaked sand, coming up behind Deidara's eyes to fill his vision black and drag him back down under. Sasori's glass-and-gravel voice rasped in the leaden fog of his mind, slow and humourless laugh from something grown too bitter with time and formaldehyde. Another slow and trembling step into blindness, a second, and he fell out of the fog to catch the open door frame, and he knew.

_The eyes_-

It didn't matter that all he could see was white bandages, the Sharingan flash-burned in his mind so deep that it eclipsed everything else. A thin scrape of strange and giddy excitement stirred, curling up inside him like the smoke that hangs over blackened ruins. Born on rising storm wings, Deidara made his way across the room clumsily, breath rasping as harsh as the desert winds that shape rocks into art. An IV stand clattered dryly across the floor, but brought no one. He went down on a shattered knee and bit back the bright dazzles of pain that lit up the red starbursts of veins inside his eyes.

"Deidara," Itachi said although he could not possibly see anything at all, that unnaturally calm voice that said he could still stop anything in its tracks with one slow blink, that come Deidara and all his explosions and they would not begin to crack that thin red ice and all the cool and clotted blood that he had spilled and then trapped up inside forever.

Deidara dragged himself back up and sat down, with a strange and sick exaltation at being this close. And here, he could see the dark smudges below Itachi's eyes were purplish, as though he was perpetually ill, falling into the eclipse cast by his own eyes.

"You're blind," he said, with a harsh half-laugh as though all the oxygen was burned from the room.

Itachi did not reply.

"You're useless like this."

The Sharingan burned, branded raw in his mind and stamped through his dreams, three long years waiting for this and he had to see. He had to know. And then he had to walk through fire and not be scorched

He reached out to the bandages. Itachi caught his wrist, cracking the recently healed bones together, thumb moving over the point that would have paralysed him, but Deidara was stronger and not working blind, and he pulled away, wrapping his hand in long black hair that felt plastic and dry to the touch. His head spun, dizzy and breathless, the way he felt when he rose too far and too fast and choked on air so thin and pure it could not sustain him.

The bandages fell away, and beneath that, Itachi's eyes had a cracked and milky white glaze overlaying the black where the red had burned out, hospital lights catching it like the backs of fish surfacing in polluted ponds.

The thin fire curdled inside Deidara as the brittle and blackened sticks that his world was built upon began to crumble. It wasn't supposed to be like this. It should have been the Sharingan, and below the red, the black like his brother's eyes, onyx that Deidara would see melt back from stony glass to the treacherous, sticky black of melting tarmac. But this was-

-the way he felt some mornings, waking from dreams punctuated with the violent white flashes of magnesium foaming away in water, back into weak dawn light. His hands squeezed shut around the gashes in his palms that let out thin explosions as insubstantial as dandelion puffs, and his mouth full of the dry and sour afterfizz of champagne, knowing that this would never be enough-

_It's a genjutsu_

The thought brought a sudden dizzy relief. Just an illusion, and there were no blank white bandages stretched over a long fall back into cooled ashes, and Deidara was still flailing in the red seas behind the Sharingan, and he could burn those away to scorching winds, reforge these crippled wax wings and rise on the thermals again-

The world ruptured apart in scarlet and gold fireworks as he forced chakra into his mind to break it, and the Sharingan stamped in afterimages on the backs of his eyelids were raw red again, the colour of a burn that would never heal.


End file.
